flash - What is the best (most productive) FLEX IDE?

Question

Some requirements:

• Step-by-step debugging & Break Points
• View variable values while debugging
• IntelliSense (auto-completion). Ideally done with "smarts" so it only shows you the syntactically valid options to complete something. E.g., Textbox. would trigger members of that class (.Text, .BackColor), etc. And then Textbox.BackColor= would trigger a list of valid colors.
• Drag'n Drop style GUI design.

I'm not concerned about cost (Ok, over $1K gets a little pricey looking :-)

Answer 1

Step by step debugging with variable view (and often with additional views like stack or global variables etc) is working in some IDEs. FlexBuilder, FDT3 Enterprise (only the enterprise version allows debugging), FlashDevelop (with extra plug-in). You can also try the (free!) Visual Studio plug-in Tofino (Ensemble), so you can debug inside Visual Studio.

But the best implementation for debugging I found in the Eclipse based IDEs. I'm not much impressed with FDT3 at all, so I recommend FlexBuilder for debugging (+profiling) and of course coding of AS and eventually (visual) design for MXML.

You can try FlashDevelop with the FDB plug-in. Many people prefer this free IDE for coding because of the nice code assist (IMHO the best of all known IDEs). Debugging is working with this plug-in but I wouldn't say that is the "most productive". But give it a try, its free!